by Brian Dear
This attitude was shared by Dan Alpert. Says Lou Volpp, who would become involved with PLATO a few years later, “Dan Alpert’s idea about getting good people to work on something was to announce that he had a problem, and he wanted some people to help with it. He would never mention that he had money. And then they would come and they would work, and he wouldn’t tell them that there was some way to get them research time or anything like that. He would find out who was compelled to work on it by the nature of the problem. And when he found out who those people were, then he’d hire them. And I think that’s why he and Don would get along so extraordinarily well.”
The “turn ’em loose” recruiting style led to great things. Steve Singer, Hanson says, “wrote an entire compiler from scratch, he was quite amazing.” The compiler (a system program that takes a human-readable programming language and converts it into machine-readable form for execution by the central processor) was called CATO, standing for, appropriately enough, “Compiler for Automatic Teaching Operations.”
Frampton, like so many Uni kids would do in coming years, had one day wandered over to CSL and marveled at the work being done in the lab. He was particularly impressed with the Cornfield project. “There was a group of four or five people who were doing this, and it was fascinating to watch the screens,” Frampton recalls. “You’d see two planes come together, and then they would run all kinds of test runs, and occasionally the planes would hit and then ‘oh shit’ and back to the drawing board.
“It must have been one of the very first efforts to do automated air traffic control where you have the program calculating quite a bit—and their idea was to put planes in different envelopes many, many hundreds of miles away, create the layer in the sky and give them signals and I can vaguely remember as they got closer and closer the signals would either blip more, be a different color, but it was a fascinating computer programming.” Everything was written in machine code, he says. “There was no programming language….I can remember that there was a certain amount of back-and-forth with the PLATO people, who were facing some conceptual issues that were not that different.”
Frampton remembers PLATO’s early days at CSL as being almost extracurricular in nature compared to other, better-funded, better-staffed CSL projects. “It was a little like the PLATO stuff was, you know, ‘going out to have a beer afterwards.’ The PLATO stuff was the easy stuff, the fun stuff, this other stuff was…hard and tedious and complicated and PLATO was, ‘Oh, well, we’re actually going to have some fun and do something.’ ”
Steve Singer hailed from Joliet, Illinois, just outside Chicago and a two-hour drive north of Urbana. In the fall of 1958, he stayed with his grandparents in Urbana and enrolled as a sophomore at Uni High. It was quite a departure from what he’d experienced as a freshman back at Joliet Township High, which dwarfed Uni High with one thousand students in its graduating class. “Uni High occupied two small buildings,” Singer says, whereas the Joliet school “occupied three or four city blocks….Except for basketball and track, Uni had no athletic program—not that I missed that. There was also no vocational training; more than half its students had a parent on the faculty of the U of I who expected them to become professionals or academics as well. There was more than a whiff of elitism in the air.”
One day Singer discovered he had “somehow offended” an Urbana High football player, someone he didn’t even know, and worse, he then found out this football player was “looking” for him. Singer had no interest in a confrontation. Being a Uni High student had its advantages, one being excellent connections with faculty at the university, since so many children at Uni had parents who taught or did research on the campus. It was time to make use of one of those advantages in hopes of steering clear of the Urbana High bully. One Uni classmate’s father, a physics professor, heard that Bitzer was looking for help over at CSL and introduced Singer as a possible candidate. He got the job. “I was glad,” Singer says, “to have a job close by where I could disappear after school—even at 90 cents per hour. Random choices sometimes lead to a vocation.”
Frampton and Singer were both a year older than Andy Hanson, and spent most of their time at CSL. Hanson considered them the “grand old men” of JETS. Hanson became more involved on a different project, with Bitzer’s guidance, where the JETS kids would build their own crude computer—or at least functioning components of one; it wasn’t clear yet how long it might take or how far they’d get—out of a nearby “ramshackle building.” Frampton and Singer were more involved in programming, and in this little building they would gather, sometimes with Hanson, to “program,” far away from the computer. The only realistic way to write a program on the ILLIAC computer, the temperamental hulking beast in the CSL building, was to work it all out on paper first, reducing their ideas to numbers and machine code—not an easy task even for adults. Only after it was on paper did one dare make an appointment and take it over to the ILLIAC to be keypunched into the machine and run.
Frampton and Singer programmed a checkers game on the ILLIAC. Writing a game on any computer is an achievement, but writing a game in 1961 on the ILLIAC—one of the first computers in the world, with extreme constraints that would confound most present-day programmers—was not a minor feat. The game was even playable. What made it special, Bitzer remembers, is that it “learned” as the game went on. The high schoolers were especially amused when adults tried their game and found the going tough, the computer winning. What they didn’t tell the adults was that the game had a convenient bug that in effect made the computer cheat.
Bitzer’s JETS group became affectionately known as “Bitzer’s Boy Scouts,” and as each summer came to an end and the high school seniors went off to college, new kids took their place, and the projects continued. But for Andy Hanson, the “Boy Scouts” moniker reminded him of something else: a Disney comic strip from the 1950s, The Junior Woodchucks of the World, featuring the antics of Huey, Dewey, and Louie, and their scoutmasters Donald Duck and Launchpad McQuack. For Andy, the local Urbana JETS chapter would always be known as “Junior Woodchucks of the Engineering School.”
Another JETS member was Carolyn Leeb (née Leach), a self-admitted “science and math geek” who had been captivated by Sputnik back in 1957 and still holds on to a folder full of yellowed newspaper clippings about the satellite. “I have vivid recollections in third grade,” she says, “even before Sputnik, of spending much of my days with a grocery bag over my head with an eye place cut out, as a space explorer.” Her dreams of going into space were “shut down,” she says, “because at my generation, there were to be no women in space. But thanks to Sputnik there was some money and emphasis on speeding up our math and science education.”
By the time she was ready for high school, Carolyn found out she qualified for Uni High, but it cost money to go there, “and there was no way that my parents could have done that.” Instead she went to Urbana High School, the quality of which exceeded her expectations. “Many of my high school teachers were women with PhDs, and of course this was in a time when women’s opportunities were severely restricted, so these women would get PhDs, their husbands would get the job at the university, where were they going to go? So my chemistry teacher, my math teachers, had PhDs.”
“It’s amazing how good, stuck off in the middle of nowhere in a cornfield…how good things were there,” says Nick Altenbernd, a classmate of Carolyn’s and a fellow JETS member. “A lot of the teachers at UHS were graduate students who were finishing up their degrees at the university….They were out of school and writing their dissertations, or something like that, and their job to keep them alive was teaching at Urbana High School. They were young and idealistic, and we really profited from that. We had a wonderful education as a result. Our first French teacher, as it happens, was Igor Stravinsky’s daughter-in-law. His son Soulima Stravinsky was on the music faculty at Illinois. And his wife, Françoise Stravinsky, who held a law degree from the Sorbonne, taught French at Urbana High School.�
�
It was decided that the JETS project, as mentored by Bitzer, was to build, from scratch, a genuine homemade computer, component by component. “We made everything, coils, metal parts, switches, by hand,” says Hanson. For starters they would build a 12-bit adder, which eventually they even got to work. An adder is exactly that: a digital circuit that electronically adds numbers in binary form. By building such a gadget, the JETS kids would learn about electricity, binary numbers, binary arithmetic, combinational logic circuits, AND gates, XOR gates, digital circuitry, and perhaps most important, how to wire the whole thing together without burning the house down. “We had quite detailed plans for how to make the timing controller and program execution but that turned out to be a bigger project than high school students could do,” he says.
In Andy’s basement, they set up on top of a Ping-Pong table what he described as a “computer component assembly line,” with lathes and coils of wire. His parents were not too appreciative of the clutter. The JETS kids then went to work spinning the coils of wire. Seemingly endless wire, countless coils.
“The whole thing was based on reed switches,” he says. A reed switch is an electromagnetic device invented by a researcher at Bell Labs in the 1930s. At its simplest, the device consists of a pair of slightly separated ferromagnetic metal “reeds,” sealed in an airtight tube to prevent contamination. The far ends of each of the metal reeds are connected to wires forming a circuit. The circuit is “off” or “open” in its default state. But if the gadget is placed close enough to a magnetic field, it could cause the two reeds to come together to the point of touching, allowing electricity to flow through the wires and across the two reeds. A common application of reed switches is in security alarm systems for windows and doors: if the door opened, for example, it might cause the switch to pass by a magnet briefly, and set off an alarm. Reed switches were cheap and relatively easy to make—two criteria that appealed to the always practical, always frugal, Donald Bitzer. Hanson recalls that they were “a relatively clean but bulky way of handling digital logic.”
“I remember hours and hours in Andy’s basement,” Carolyn Leeb recalls, “trying to perfect, then mass-produce, the switches. We listened to comedy and music from the likes of the Smothers Brothers and the Limelighters.” She can still recall the words to the Limelighters’ song “Vickie Dougan” and the Kingston Trio’s “Scotch and Soda.”
One time Bitzer was trying to drill a piece of sheet metal but the metal spun and cut his hand and once again he was off to the emergency room for stitches. “I remember Dr. Bitzer arranging for computer time for us in the middle of the night and how cool we thought we were hanging out in the Union or at the Spudnut shop,” says Carolyn. (Spudnuts were not just ordinary doughnuts: these were made with potatoes, and devoured by Midwesterners of the era.) The JETS kids discovered camaraderie on the project. Some dated each other. Andy and Carolyn did for a while. Everyone had membership pins to wear on their lapels. The pin? A miniature golden slide rule. Given the fact that West Side Story had won Best Picture in the 1961 Oscars, it wasn’t surprising that this nerdy ensemble of Urbana kids would joke about their name being shared by one of the gangs in the movie. “We made jokes about it all the time,” says Carolyn. “Stuff like, ‘soldering irons instead of switchblades.’ ”
Bitzer’s enthusiasm, electrical engineering wizardry, and most of all his positive attitude toward failure impressed Carolyn, who described his approach as, Well, let’s try this material. Oh, that doesn’t work, well, let’s try this then. “The notion that failure means you got to try something different,” she says. “Failure was never a roadblock. It was just rerouting.” Altenbernd views Bitzer as a “first exemplar of what a free-wheeling mind can do.” To an optimist like Bitzer, failure was actually success—congratulations were in order—in that it meant one could scratch one approach off the list and move on to try a different approach. One fewer thing on the list. “It’s an attitude that will serve you well in any kind of discipline,” says Altenbernd. “We built and tested lots of failed ideas,” says Hanson, “converging towards a working design over a long period of what was really research. For example, I remember inventing the principle for a ‘memory’ switch sitting on Bitzer’s floor one evening fooling around with some metal strips and some magnets—possibly even patentable, but we never pursued it.”
Hanson was looking for something to do over the summer of 1961. “I had a really boring summer job the year before and was looking for something interesting,” he says, and somehow he heard about an opportunity at the PLATO project. He describes Bitzer’s management style as monkeys and typewriters: “He’d define a problem only if he needed something specific done. The rest of the time I think he sort of trusted us to come up with things, and many people did just because of the freedom to do so.
“Bitzer at least made me feel as though I were the main designer,” says Hanson, “with him collaborating on figuring out what main idea needed work next and getting resources if we needed them. Then I served as the main conduit to the other students, who could grasp what was going on. Mike Walker was one of the few who really turned out to have the right stuff to pick up the ball where I left off.”
A friend of Andy’s, Mike Walker got interested in the JETS activities and would eventually take over the leadership of the project when Andy graduated from high school. Together they programmed the ILLIAC to play a version of Kalah (known also as Mancala) and didn’t understand enough complexity theory to calculate how long it would take to run through the possible outcomes. “One weekend we brought sleeping bags and started our program running to try to ‘solve’ Kalah by exhaustion, and about four in the morning, a microscopic way through the exhaustive search, a campus policeman found us sleeping behind the computer and kicked us out. I don’t know if Bitzer got heat from that or not.” It was not the last time the police would kick kids out of the building late at night.
Hanson couldn’t believe CSL even allowed him and the other JETS kids in the building, and yet, there they were, sometimes working twenty-four hours straight through. He attributes their unhindered access to Don Bitzer. “Bitzer had this amazing, very explicitly articulated philosophy,” says Hanson, “that he didn’t care who was doing what, as long as he had the most capable people he could rustle up from any walk of life to do his work for him. And he just basically gave us a lot of freedom and he got a lot of stuff out of us for essentially no money. I mean he was paying a dollar an hour or something.” Decades later, Bitzer’s involvement in JETS can be viewed at least in part as a recruitment effort as much as one of genuine encouragement and mentoring. He knew there were bright kids out there in local high schools. He knew he could help them discover talents and creativity they didn’t even know they had yet. And he knew he needed help on the PLATO project. So it is not surprising to find the cream of the crop from JETS winding up working on PLATO in serious and meaningful ways.
—
In the spring of 1962, the Urbana JETS presented their computer project at a local JETS science fair. It should have been a wild success. It should have brought great recognition to Andy and the rest of the JETS for accomplishing so much. They did win some sort of statewide award, but it was a bittersweet win. Not because Andy Hanson and his teammates had done anything wrong. On the contrary: they’d done everything right. To their shock they discovered people felt they were too good, and judged their work not to be their own.
JETS members, Urbana High, 1962 Credit 13
“There were lots of little pieces of really interesting research,” Hanson recalls, “many details of which I had the only real overview, though many of the JETS members knew their ‘specialty.’ So I was all charged up to try to explain all the concepts and put everything together in one big picture, not only for the judging panel but for the other students.” Hanson got halfway into what he thought was a “bang-up job” in his lecture, describing his group’s project in detail, when the judges cut him short and walked off in a hu
ff. One of the professors came over, took Hanson aside, and proceeded to, in Hanson’s words, chew him out. “I was told by our sponsoring teacher later that they were extremely offended at my ‘attitude’ of ‘pretending’ to know it all, and had decided on that basis to downgrade the rating of the project, though not too much, in deference to the fact that the other kids had put so much work into it. I was incredibly offended at the idea that here were actual university professors who were not interested in the concepts, the work, the research, but only in trying to make sure my tone of voice didn’t imply that I knew more than they did.” For a long time afterward, Hanson would question “whether scientists were really to be trusted when they said they believed in research for its own sake; clearly this group did not.” After the disaster at the JETS fair, Hanson’s friends told him they wanted to hear the rest of his talk, but Hanson was disillusioned and “never really got up the enthusiasm to do it again after the put-down.” Hanson remembers numerous people coming by his team’s exhibit booth, but they would take one look, snootily mutter, “Oh, well, they had help…,” and walk away. “We never had that kind of help,” Hanson says. “Bitzer made sure that everything we knew we learned the hard way.”